In theory what I came here to do is to cap off my final trio of blog posts. The deadline has long since passed (by which I mean even longer since passed than it usually has by my third post), but for some reason I feel like I shouldn't leave my last blog set of my last Mitchell class without a last blog post. It would be the first I've missed and I guess I'm feeling sentimental. Keeping these has been both a burden and a lot of fun -- they're the kind of thing that're a pain to start and a joy to finish. Have they improved my writing? It's hard to say -- maturation, as I've learned from this last semester, is mostly imperceptible as it happens, but looking back on my writings from two Septembers ago is fairly cringe-inducing. Although there is some nostalgia there -- I'm starry-eyed and emotionally invested, caring more about characters feeling good than what the author was actually thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's what felt compelling at the time. Mostly I'm surprised I didn't notice the change.
Looking back on my 31 published posts (plus 11 unpublished), I can see that what I have is my own unintentional bildungsroman. One of the best things about writing is that it lets us look inside brains from the past, and that's no less true when it applies to our own past. Why else keep diaries, journals, old stories and poems? It's not that I plan to go through each and every post (or, god forbid, old paper), but having them around to peruse helps remind me who I used to be. Like a Tralfamadorian, I can see the change that's hidden in my sliding day-to-day. Not just in my more polished writing (although yes, it is cool for a coming-of-age novel to show growth through better prose. Joyce did it, why can't I?), but also in the things I look for and the ideas I play with. If nothing else I think I care more. The apathetic post-sophomore who stepped into his 20th Century Novel class definitely was not expecting books like The Stranger or Song of Solomon, or the way their ideas about self-definition and fully lived experience would shape the next two years of his life.
From my brief and stormy dalliance with moral relativism, to my near-obsessive, never-published speculations on family lines Housekeeping's, to all the other ideas about society and love and loneliness and responsibility that I picked up from books I would never have bothered to read if these classes hadn't first gotten me interested in reading, to even the way I've writing has become one of the things I care most about, I think it's fair to say that these three classes have been the most influential I've ever taken. Not that those are the only things that I've gotten from them. Here, I made a list.
Things I care more about than I used to, in descending order of pedantry:
5. Narrative Voice
4. Tense
3. Basic formatting
2. Footnotes
1. Em dashes
And then, coming up again, like when movies zoom through bodies into atoms to reveal whole other universes:
1. The place of the narrator
2. Identity/the way we describe ourselves
3. The concept of telling stories
4. Writing
5. Maybe, consequentially, people.
What I'm saying is it's been a ride, and I don't really know where I'd be without it. Even in the seminars of my fancy collegiate institution, I'll miss these classes in the dingy old attic. So the reason I'm really here probably has less to do with guilt over a few missed points, and more to do with writing something that feels important on its own. For one thing, the last chapter in this long, winding, often-rushed novel named after the last episode of television I'd seen before the naming paper was passed around in class. But also a letter of thanks. Here, I'll just say it: thank you, Mr. Mitchell, for two fun years and 32 great chapters.
Alright, blog. Let's send you off to that Belize.
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